The Elusive Self and the I-Thou Relation

Abstract

The elusive self! Let me first indicate how I understand these terms. For those who posit, as I do, a self that is more than its passing states, and which may not be reduced at all to observable phenomena, the problem arises at once of how such a self is to be described and identified. It cannot be identified in terms of any pattern of experience or of any relation to a physically identifiable body. How then can it be known at all? It is known, I maintain, solely in the way each one, in the first instance, knows himself to be the unique being he is. No one, at this level, is in any doubt as to who he is — he is himself. He knows himself as no other. This does not mean that he may not, in other ways, fail to know who he is. He may fail to know much about his own nature or dispositions; he may, through loss of memory, be unaware of some of the more important things in his own history, the sort of things by which he is outwardly identified — where he was born, where he lives and works, and so forth. But in a more basic sense he still knows that this happened to the unique being he finds himself to be. He cannot say anything to identify himself in this sense, he just knows what he knows.